New generation of SCADA systems for the Swiss Federal Railways

Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is responsible for the generation of electricity for driving trains throughout the country. It has an installed capacity of 860 MW which accounts for about 25% of its energy requirement. The rest comes from various partner utilities, and also from jointly owned utilities where it has its own generators installed. With the increasing number and size of power stations and the growing complexity of the network, SBB started installing small stand-alone Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in order to maintain a reliable supply to the railway. Since their inception in 1981, these SCADA systems have undergone several hardware and software upgrades to keep up with the most recent technology. Today SBB has one of the most advanced, state of the art systems in Europe. This paper outlines the functionality of the new SBB SCADA systems with particular reference to the new regional systems. The overall concept, the evolution of hardware, the basic software functions, as well as the special functions integrated into the system are also discussed